Joseph E. Persico (64 page)

Chapter XXX

Aftermath

THERE WAS no Redoubt. It was a fiction hatched in the fertile imagination of Josef Goebbels, a last gasp attempt to dispirit the Allies and give a doomed Germany a bargaining chip to play against unconditional surrender. On April 30, eighteen days after FDR's death, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the
Führerbunker,
a dank catacomb twenty feet below the Berlin sewer system. At 2:30
A.M.
on May 7, General Alfred Jodl, operations chief of the German High Command, sat down at a battered examination table in a boys school in Rheims, France, and signed the surrender of the Third Reich to take effect at one minute past midnight on May 9. Allen Dulles's maneuvers to secure an early peace in northern Italy, plagued by continued Russian obstructionism, shaved only five days off the conflict.

FDR's death might have seemed a momentary respite for the Japanese. They determined, however, that gloating was the wrong tone. An intercepted message from Tokyo to outposts throughout Southeast Asia read: “. . . [W]e are wiring various points you should be aware of in propagandizing the death of President Roosevelt.” Japanese officials were instructed to “[a]void observations such as Roosevelt's death will have an immediate effect on the fighting spirit and war strength of the United States. Do not make personal attacks on Roosevelt. Do not convey any impression that we are exultant over the death of Roosevelt.” The removal of FDR from the world stage could make no difference except to the most hopelessly optimistic Japanese. In the island-hopping strategy pursued in the Pacific by American forces, Guadalcanal, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, and Iwo Jima had fallen, ever tightening the noose around Japan's throat. General MacArthur returned triumphantly to the Philippine Islands. Eleven days before the President's death, Army and Marine divisions had swarmed ashore on Okinawa, considered part of Japan proper and only 350 miles south of the home islands. Magic decrypts revealed that those Japanese who were spared home front propaganda understood the implacability of their enemy. Arlington Hall broke a message to Tokyo from a Japanese diplomat posted to Moscow reporting remarks made by the then American ambassador, Admiral William H. Standley: “. . . [T]he Americans will not forget Pearl Harbor,” Standley was quoted as saying, “and they will as sure as death give Japan the beating of her life. He says with great heat that the Americans will fight till they are dead to accomplish this.” The cable concluded, “If all Americans are of this mind . . . I don't know what will become of all of us.” The answer came with blinding finality on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the first atom bomb dropped on an enemy exploded over the Shima Surgical Hospital in Hiroshima and three days later, when a second bomb incinerated Nagasaki. On August 14, Japan surrendered unconditionally.

Three weeks before, after a contentious Big Three meeting in the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, President Truman had approached Stalin, who was standing with his interpreter. “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” Truman later wrote of the encounter. Truman was telling the Soviet leader nothing that he did not already know.

The month before the Potsdam conference, Klaus Fuchs, on his Saturday afternoon off, had parked a battered automobile with rationed gas and balding tires at the Castillo Street bridge in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A sweating, heavyset figure peering through thick glasses moved from the shade of a park bench and entered the car. Fuchs's passenger was Harry Gold, the Philadelphia chemist and NKVD courier. Fuchs drove on and parked again, this time in a cul-de-sac. On the seat beside him rested an envelope stuffed with statistical charts, mathematical calculations, and scale drawings relating to the atom bomb, including instructions for producing a critical implosion lens. Fuchs tipped off Gold that the bomb would be tested soon in the New Mexico desert. Gold left the car, taking the envelope. No cash changed hands. The last time his Soviet controllers had tried to pay Fuchs $1,500, the physicist, his idealism offended, refused to take the money. On July 16, just before dawn in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, scientists and military observers protected by dark glasses had crouched on Compania Hill, twenty miles from ground zero, and witnessed a flash of light that surpassed the sun. Fuchs was among those present at the first detonation of an atomic bomb.

The knowledge that this test had succeeded was what had led Truman to confide to the unimpressed Stalin that the United States had a weapon of unprecedented destructive force. Stalin had not received Truman's revelation as a gesture of Allied solidarity. Instead, he interpreted it to mean that the President was flaunting America's newfound power in order to intimidate the Soviet Union. After returning to his quarters on Kaiserstrasse, Stalin called his NKVD chief, Lavrenti Beria, who had been tracking the progress of the American A-bomb through Fuchs and other Soviet agents, and ordered him to get in touch with Igor Kurchatov, head of Russia's own atomic project. “Tell Comrade Kurchatov,” Stalin instructed, “that he has to hurry with his ‘parcel,' and ask him what our scientists need to accelerate the work.” The nuclear arms race was on. It is estimated that Soviet agents managed to acquire some ten thousand pages of technical data related to the Manhattan Project. This stolen treasure enabled Stalin's scientists to save up to four years in developing their own atom bomb. The first nuclear weapon the Soviets exploded was virtually a twin of the one detonated at Alamogordo.

While German agents operating in the United States had been ordered to penetrate America's atomic secrets, the effort failed since most of these spies were caught by the FBI. The Nazi regime essentially remained ignorant to the end of what was happening at Los Alamos. As for the Japanese, in the most literal sense, they never knew what hit them. The enterprise that Roosevelt had first approved in 1939 had been an astonishingly well-kept secret, at least from enemies.

Controversy over the use of the bomb against Japan will persist as long as contemporary generations cannot re-create the climate—political, military, and emotional—prevailing at the time it was dropped. As for FDR's position, his son James claimed that his father had never expressed any hesitation over using the bomb. Secretary Stimson states in his memoirs: “At no time from 1941 to 1945, did I ever hear it suggested by the President, or by any other responsible member of the government, that atomic energy should not be used in the war.” The moral debate turns on this question: Was dropping a single bomb on Hiroshima and then another on Nagasaki more reprehensible than other methods of mass destruction, notably, raining thousands of conventional bombs on German and Japanese cities. On the night of March 9–10, 1945, General Curtis LeMay sent 334 B-29s, flying unopposed over Tokyo for three hours, carpeting the city with incendiary bombs. Between 80,000 and 100,000 Japanese civilians perished in the flames, the deadliest day of the war. In the atomic bombing of Hiroshima approximately 80,000 were believed to have died, in addition to tens of thousands injured. It is difficult to imagine that the victims in either city would have detected a moral distinction at being incinerated by a conventional versus a nuclear weapon.

o

While the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor seems at first a stupendous American defeat and an intelligence failure of staggering magnitude, in the end it proved to be a Japanese catastrophe. The misery of Japan at war's end, its major cities reduced to charred waste, two of them rendered into atomic ash, and two million Japanese military and civilian dead demonstrate that the attack of December 7, 1941, was as much an infamy inflicted by the Japanese on themselves as against the United States.

A blunder of equal magnitude was Hitler's declaration of war on America four days after Pearl Harbor. A Gallup poll taken just a month and a half before the attack revealed that only 17 percent of Americans favored war with Germany. FDR would have been hard-pressed to engineer through Congress a declaration of war against an enemy in Europe when the country had just been plunged into war in the Pacific. Hitler saved him the trouble. Hitler's attack on Russia placed the lid on the coffin of the Third Reich. His declaration of war against the United States nailed it down.

One area of intelligence that the President chose to disregard out of political expedience also began with Pearl Harbor. FDR had convincing information from Donovan's COI, John Franklin Carter's ring, the FBI, and Army intelligence that Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens posed no threat to American security. Still he chose to appease public paranoia and signed Executive Order 9066, which uprooted these people and sent them to remote and inhospitable “relocation centers” in Arizona, California, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho. By May 1944, Henry Stimson quietly admitted to FDR that no military necessity existed for keeping loyal Japanese in the camps. Nisei, first-generation Japanese Americans, exemplified that loyalty. The all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat team that fought in Italy and France gained fame as the “Christmas tree regiment,” the most decorated unit in the Army. Over seventeen thousand Japanese Americans eventually served in the armed forces. But, as the cabinet debated the desirability of releasing the interned Japanese, Stimson warned that other Americans might riot against them, and Japan might retaliate by harming American prisoners of war. FDR bought Stimson's argument. He told Edward Stettinius in June, after the Japanese had been penned up for over two years, “The more I think of this problem of suddenly ending the orders excluding Japanese Americans from the West Coast, the more I think it would be a mistake to do anything drastic or sudden.” The act, once implemented, however unnecessary, provided its own momentum.

Other voices argued against the injustice. The First Lady, former secretary of state Cordell Hull, even Harold Ickes, who ran the relocation program, all pressed the President to free the Japanese. Finally, FDR reversed himself, and by September 1944, twenty thousand internees were being released every month. Still, the deed had been done. The American Civil Liberties Union branded the internment of the Japanese “the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.”

o

While the internment of the Japanese has been referred to as the American Holocaust, the reality of what the Jews of Europe suffered renders the comparison offensive. Doubtless, Roosevelt could have exerted stronger moral leadership, expressed greater public outrage, and warned the Nazis more ominously of the fate of those who practiced the policy of extermination. If only for the psychological effect, a few bombers could have been spared to disrupt the rail lines to the extermination camps. But as Professor William Rubinstein, author of
The Myth of Rescue,
concludes, “[N]ot one plan or proposal, made anywhere in the democracies by either Jews or non-Jewish champions of the Jews after the Nazi conquest of Europe could have rescued one single Jew who perished in the Holocaust.” Since the Nazis continued murdering Jews right to the end of the war, even diverting for that purpose manpower and transportation desperately needed by their armies, it is evident that every day by which the war was shortened meant thousands of Jewish lives saved. Anything else would have amounted to a symbolic gesture. That was the reality FDR accepted.

*

The President died believing that the mission led by Lauchlin Currie had ended Swiss transactions aiding the Nazi regime. Another half century would pass before the full story came to light. Not only had Swiss bankers continued to buy gold after the Currie agreement, thus helping Germany to fight on, but after the war, certain Swiss banks knowingly kept gold and deposits belonging to murdered Jews even when the families tried to recover their inheritance. Many Jewish accounts had been emptied or supposedly disappeared, though auditors in the mid-1990s unearthed forty-five thousand such accounts established in Switzerland during the era of Jewish persecution. By the mid-1990s, investigations by private Jewish organizations and the U.S. government forced the truth to the surface. Under worldwide pressure, the two major Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle all outstanding claims against the country. Jewish groups had sought $30 billion. The compensation agreement was announced jointly on January 30, 1999, by American Vice President Al Gore and Ruth Dreifuss, the first woman and the first Jew to become president of Switzerland.

*

Seven months after FDR's death, a stoutish, unfashionable, thirty-seven-year-old woman entered FBI headquarters in New York. Elizabeth Bentley, the NKVD courier, had come to unburden her soul. Her disenchantment with communism had begun the year before, after the death of her controller and lover, Jacob Golos. Bentley had inherited the task from him of passing intelligence to NKVD agents in the United States and had become increasingly disillusioned. “They made no bones of the fact that they had contempt for American Communists with their vague idealism, no bones of the fact that they were using the American Communist Party as a recruitment for espionage and in general,” she charged, “. . . they were about the cheapest type of person I have ever seen, the gangster type.” On November 30, 1945, Bentley began pouring out her story to Special Agents Thomas G. Spencer and Joseph M. Kelly in a deposition running to 107 pages and studded with the names of those whom she claimed had aided the Soviet Union, among them Duncan Lee of the OSS, George Silverman, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, and Lauchlin Currie.

In 1948, Bentley became the star witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and a subcommittee of the Senate Investigating Committee. She was shaken to find her name splashed across the tabloids as “The Red Spy Queen” and “blonde bombshell” despite her forgettable appearance and mouse brown tresses. Whittaker Chambers, who nine years before had gone to Adolf Berle with the names of persons he said he knew to be aiding the Soviets, also repeated his charges before HUAC. Between Bentley and Chambers, accusations of espionage performed for the Soviet Union were lodged against nearly forty Americans, almost all federal officials during the war.